Remembered

Our yearly trip to the Pumpkin Patch and Edwards Apple Orchard this weekend. On this trip we had Zach, Noah, Maya, and myself. Today's weather was warmer for this trip than in many years past reaching 70° F and making it most pleasant outside. Maya enjoyed running around outdoors and we enjoyed chasing after her.

Wyvern's Haunt Logo Complete

Wyvern's Haunt Logo

This project started more than a year ago, but was put on hold and resumed at the beginning of this month. My basement work area is known as the Wyvern's Haunt, and I wanted to design and build a logo for it. The idea was for a dragon with art deco elements. After an initial concept drawing I had Nathan Kroll of Let's Just Be Foes finalize the drawing. I traced out the drawing in SketchUp, and selected a piece of maple for the back drop. After that the idea sat for a long time.
In early October I picked up a large enough piece of black walnut to do the project, and slowly the project has progressed over the month. The last couple of days I have been finishing the project with several coats of lacquer. This required me to create a vented area in the basement as it is too cool in the garage to do lacquer work. I covered an area in plastic around a basement window. In the window I put one of my blower fans as a fume exhaust. This allowed me to use my HVLP sprayer to apply the lacquer. A space heater kept the temperature up in the paint room so the lacquer would dry faster, and I was able to get about 8 coats of lacquer on the project. Today now that everything was dry I did a very light sanding and mounted the setup above the entrance to the Wyvern's Haunt.

Watching the Solar Eclipse

There was a partial solar eclipse that would have been visible in Middleton this afternoon. Unfortunately that day was overcast and rainy so it wasn't visible. Undeterred I found a web broadcast of the event and watched the eclipse that way. I had some detailed sanding on my wood project to take care of—all those tinny corners to clean up—so plenty of time to watch the eclipse.

7360x1600

Yesterday Pluvius came to visit. He brought some parts for Rev. James' new computer as well as a monitor he was selling me. I was pleased with the monitor I had from him and this one was identical. So today I worked it into the setup. The new monitor is too heavy for my monitor arm, so I am going to have to look into a new solution for that. Nonetheless it is function in it's current position. The monitor that was on the arm replaced my 1280x1024 monitor in the upper right corner. This is my status monitor and it now has a 1600x1200 display which is a nice improvement.
I did the glue up for my wood project this evening now that the oil finish on the walnut has dried. Yesterday I sanded the backs of the walnut to remove any oil that dripped onto the back. This should give me a better surface for the glue up. After gluing was complete I placed a board on top the setup and a couple of heavy items on top of that—a couple cylinder blocks and an anvil. That should keep it good and compressed while the glue dries. We'll have a look tomorrow.
My to-do list has a lot of check marks. Yesterday my 3 day synchronization from my RAID array to a backup drive completed. Changing the drive on with my cheap RAID card is tricky, and potentially dangerous. So I decided before I started I wanted a 100% backup of the data. After the RAID repair I plan to use the backup drive in the Red Dragon for automatic nightly backups. I started this project, and while it works the 1 TB drive I have in that machine isn't large enough to hold what I need backed.

Xen at work

Yesterday was an evening of wash, but I kept myself busy while doing it. I gave my wood project the finishing sanding and then coated the black walnut in linseed oil. It turned a spectacular dark brown—I love how walnut does that. I also moved the mount for my hanging bike. People were complaining it was in the way of the stairs so I moved the rig back a couple of feet. This is a better position and allows me to raise the bike even higher. The last big project I worked on was an other broken pane of glass. This one was in a door which has several small glass pieces. I wasn't sure how I was going to get in the setup to replace it, but after removing the glass and using a pry bar I found the seam. It turned out to be pretty easy to remove the wood frame from around the glass. With all the frame work I have been doing I had plenty of small panes of glass, and had one large enough to replace this broken one. The last trick was to put the frame back together and somehow drive in the nails that held it in place. Most of the door is glass supported by a thin frame. How to hammer this without breaking any other glass was the question. Turned out Xiphos had a great solution—his pneumatic nail gun. While this sounds silly at first, the reality is that one quick blast and the small nail is driven. There is no repeated impacts. His idea made quick work of replacing the frame and it was clear this solution was far safer than trying to use a hammer.
Pictured is Xen carving his pumpkin for Halloween.

How I Broke the Odroid

Battery Test

The last of the parts to the solar portion of the solar powered web server arrived this weekend. I now have the battery, charger, and solar panel. Unfortunately I had gone and destroyed my Odroid, but more on that in a bit. Now that all the parts were here I wanted to do a quick check on the battery and charger. I wasn't sure how sealed lead acid batteries shipped so I thought I'd give this new battery a charge using it's new charger. For this I used my bench power supply and fed this into the charger. I played around a bit with different voltages and limited current to see how the charger handled it. Not sure how the charger works, but it looks to work in pulses. I watched the current limit light on the power supply steady strobe meaning the charger pulled as much current as it could, paused, and repeated the process. After a few hours the current draw on the power supply dropped significantly so it was clear the battery had been topped off and was now at full charge. All ready to go, and no computer to serve.
So what happened to my Odroid? Me. I had constructed one of the current measurement circuits in permanent form and was allowing the system to run. But at some point I bumped the setup and momentarily shorted the 12 VDC to ground. This doesn't seem like a problem at first because one would think the power would have just gone away. But it's a little more complicated that than. The 12 VDC feeds a converter that steps the voltage down to 5 volts. This converter likely has a capacitor and this capacitor would have a fair bit of charge because the power supply is capable of delivering 20 watts. The Odroid is mostly idle and had been running at about 1.6 watts. So what we briefly had was a setup where there was a voltage reverse. Not sure what all this did, but it wasn't good. The Odroid won't start or even get close—it just draws a large amount of current and does nothing else.
I looked at the schematics to see if there wasn't something I could find that might cause this problem. Sometimes a problem like this is as simple as a dead diode that is now creating a short. It looks like the power goes directly to a voltage regulation chip, but little else. I may have destroyed the chip, or maybe something further down the line. But so far it looks like things are bad.

Not satisfied with my photos of Devil's Lake State Park on Friday due to the overcast skies, I returned today for a follow-up. This time I had sunlight. There were still a lot of clouds in the sky, but enough openings to make for better landscape shots. After shooting at the state park, I traveled to Indian Lake County Park where I had biked over the summer for more pictures. Then finally back to our home, Elmwood Park were the trees in front yard were giving a fantastic display of color. I took over 500 pictures, and saved 90. The fall color is pretty much at it's peek, so this was a good weekend to get out and enjoy the color.

Unlucky Doll

This evening a group of us visited House on the Rock for their Halloween event. We did this last year and loved it so decided to take the trip again this year. The attraction has such a strange collection of weird things it is already rather creepy. For the Halloween event they turn off most of the lights, add black lights, and several Halloween elements. It is a lot of fun to photograph in these dark conditions. I used ISO 3200 for most of the night, shooting between -1 and -2 F-stops. The pictures are fairly grainy because of the ISO, but still quite functional and there were several I was pleased with.